Rockford men from Israel, Palestinian territories weigh in on Gaza War

Thursday

Aug 14, 2014 at 10:20 AMAug 14, 2014 at 3:50 PM

By Ben StanleyRockford Register Star

Editor's note: The woman featured in this story died Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014, from injuries sustained when an Israeli tank shell hit her apartment in July. Deema Kaloob lost both her legs as a result of the explosion and was being treated at a hospital in Jordan. Her 4-year-old son, Ibrahim Kaloob, was killed instantly.

ROCKFORD — Since July, two men have watched from Rockford asviolence flared 6,000 miles away in the latest battle on a war-weary strip of disputed territory along the Mediterranean. Both were born there.

Adey Khader is a 26-year-old Palestinian graduate student studying business at Rockford University.

Roni Golan is a 54-year-old Israeli artist who runs a studio in downtown Rockford.

In July, Khader’s 4-year-old cousin, Ibrahim Kaloob, was killed when an Israeli tank shell pounded through the walls of his family’s apartment in Gaza. Ibrahim’s mother, Deema, had been making breakfast. Ibrahim was standing beside her in the kitchen and was killed instantly. Deema lost a leg.

“When I say he was 4 years old, I am lying,” Khader said of Ibrahim, who was born and died during periods of increased hostility between Israel and Palestine.

“He was three wars old.”

Golan lived in Israel until he was 36 and served in the Israeli military from 1978 to 1981, three years of relative peace. His two daughters also served. Yasmin, who is 27, lives in Rockford with her husband and children, and Maya, who is 25, is studying at a ​u​niversity in Israel.

“She has to duck 15 times a day,” Golan said of Maya, referring to sporadic missile fire from Hamas militants.

More than ​1,900 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have died since fighting began​ when three Israeli boys were found murdered June 30. The body of a kidnapped Palestinian boy who had burned to death was found three days later.

On Sunday, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agreed to a new 72-hour cease-fire that began one minute after midnight on Monday. By Wednesday, Egyptian-mediated truce talks had resumed.

But ​long-standing property ​disputes, blockades ​and religious tension, motivated by fear and exacerbated by proximity, have built a wall between the two peoples. The two sides both lay claim to an area of land roughly the size of Massachusetts.​

“I hope that it will hold,” Khader said of the cease-fire.

Close quarters

​All together, ​Israel and ​the ​Palestine ​territories comprise an area of about 10,000 square miles populated by nearly 12 million people. ​The​ 4 million Palestinians are split between two geographic areas — the West Bank, governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization, also known as PLO, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by the Islamic Resistance Movement, referred to by its ​A​rabic acronym, Hamas. Nearly 8 million Israelis live in a continuous stretch of land between the West Bank and Gaza.

Polarized peoples

Emily McKee is an assistant professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University. Since 2004 she has conducted research in both Israel and the West Bank and wrote her dissertation on land conflicts and social divisions within Israel.

Travel restrictions have kept her out of Gaza since 2004, McKee said.

Political sentiment within Israel has been trending further to the right in recent years, and there has been a troubling increase in the level of polarization between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as among Israelis, McKee said.

“There are reports of backlash (in Israel) for speaking out against this war,” McKee said.

It used to be that Israelis and Palestinians would regularly cross into one another’s territory to go shopping or run err​ands, but that kind of daily interaction is less common now, she said.

War’s shadow

“There’s 2 kilometers (around the perimeter) in Gaza where it’s an empty area, and then you start with buildings,” Khader said, and the buildings are so densely populated that “If you shoot a small gun, you will kill somebody.”

Khader studied software engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City from 2005 to 2012. He said that life in Gaza is complicated. The area’s approximately 1.8 million residents, Khader said, are caught between two forces: Israeli airstrikes and tanks from outside Gaza, and Hamas secret police from within.

“Walking in the street during the wartime, you look into the children’s eyes and you see the sadness, you see the fear,” Khader said. “It’s a fear factory in Gaza.”

Khader flipped through pictures on his phone of dead children and dead friends, one of them a journalist, covered in dust and rubble in the streets of Gaza City.

“I don’t feel human when I see these pictures,” he said.

“You can’t create Israel on children’s blood. You can’t let Israel stand on children’s blood. It’s not fair for Israeli people because their face in the war will not be beautiful. It is not (fair) for the Palestinian children because they have the right to live like all other children.”

Golan also expressed disgust over the bloodshed in Gaza. Israelis and Palestinians have been at odds for so long that they have forgotten how to empathize with one another, he said.

Israelis lash out because they fear for survival, a fear that has its roots in the Holocaust and was thickened through years of hostile treatment from surrounding nations, he said. Israelis feel cornered, he said.

On the other hand, Palestinians fight out of fear they will lose their land, honor and culture, and they are surrounded as well, he said.

“So, in the psyche, people are stuck in these modes,” Golan said. “One out of fear, maybe, and the other out of feeling (dispossessed).”

Many Israelis believe Hamas shields itself behind women, children and civilians and is therefore responsible for the civilian deaths when Israel responds to violent provocation. Many also believe that Hamas uses the deaths of children as propaganda against Israel and deliberately causes them by stashing and firing weapons from places like schools.

To describe the mindset of the Israeli government and military, Golan quoted Golda M​e​ir, a Ukrainian-born ​Z​ionist who grew up in Milwaukee and would eventually be Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Khader said that one of the reasons he came to the United States to study was because he does not agree with Hamas.

“Hamas using Gaza to hide weapons is not acceptable,” Khader said. “But that does not give the Israeli army a right to attack.”

The situation is beyond our ability to solve with political negotiations, sanctions or laws, Golan said.

“It has to be in our ability to feel (empathize),” he said, that peace can be achieved.

Both Khader and Golan expressed a longing for peace and a permanent end to what has become a perpetual war.

Khader said that over decades of conflict, both sides are guilty of committing atrocities. It is time to look at the fighting as a human issue, he said, not as a political one.

“Anytime that someone doesn’t die, it’s great,” Golan said of the cease-fire. “But are we pushing the problem under the carpet until it gets bigger?”

He hopes that negotiations will not be limited to the most recent conflict, and that a permanent solution will soon emerge.